thinkprogress wrote:Fossil fuels took a licking in local elections in Colorado and Washington on Tuesday, as voters resoundingly said no to oil and gas fracking and coal exports.

In Washington state, the four progressive candidates for seats on the Whatcom County Council that will likely decide the fate of a controversial coal export terminal proposal were running well ahead Tuesday night. Incumbents Ken Mann and Carl Weimer, and challengers Rud Browne and Barry Buchanan were all backed by opponents of the coal terminal, including Washington Conservation Voters which spent nearly $300,000 on the progressive candidates’ campaigns.

climateprogress wrote:The Washington Post editorial board calls a carbon tax “one of the best ideas in Washington almost no one in Congress will talk about.” It joins a very diverse group (including conservative economists, big oil companies, environmental advocates, and most Americans) that thinks pricing carbon pollution is smart policy. People are talking about it, if you know where to listen. ...

Putting a price on carbon pollution is something that finds support in across the globe, and in some very unexpected places.

Large areas of the world have already put a price on carbon:

• 33 countries and 18 sub-national jurisdictions will price carbon in 2013. This comprises 850 million people and nearly a third of the global economy. • An official in the Chinese Ministry of Finance said that the country was considering a price on carbon along with a market-based cap-and-trade system. China’s emissions are the largest in the world and if the nation put a well-designed price on carbon it would have a significant impact.

Support for pricing carbon pollution is surprisingly widespread in the U.S.:

• 67 percent of Americans would rather reduce the deficit via a carbon tax than through cutting government programs, according to a poll conducted last December. ...

Hi, Padma Norbu,I wouldn't take this guy's word without extreme caution and cross-checking. The fact that he starts out by ridiculing genuine concerns with his "bananas" comparisons is a bit of a worry, so I looked him up:

The Adam Smith Institute is one of the world's leading think tanks. Independent, non-profit, and non-partisan, it works to promote libertarian and free market ideas through research, publishing, media commentary, and educational programmes. Famous for its trail-blazing work on tax, privatization, and public service reform, the Institute is today at the forefront of making the case for free markets and a free society in the United Kingdom.

Hard Right, obviously, but maybe not Loony Right.

… To protect our independence, the Adam Smith Institute accepts no government funding. Most of our funding comes from private individuals who believe in liberty and want to see a freer world; the rest comes from various foundations, businesses and the sales of our books.

Thanks, Kevin. This is the current state of the chicanery uncovered in Oreskes' "Merchants of Doubt", which I have mentioned a few times already. It's disappointing to know it's still going strong. And when Brulle says, "The Donors group has now displaced such previous prominent supporters of the climate denial movement as the Koch-affiliated foundations and corporations like Exxon Mobil," he is just saying the fossil fuel industry has learned to anonymise its donations. Not good.

Thanks, Tatpurusa.I didn't know RT but they do seem to be a viable alternative to the mainstream US media. I actually recommend Al Jazeera http://www.aljazeera.com/ for the same reason.Those articles are, IMO, somewhat alarmist - not really wrong but exaggerating the problems for the sake of a good story. Helen Caldicott's item was particularly unbalanced, as she clearly has such a hardline stance that she won't admit that there are safe levels of radiation. Don't get me wrong - I would like to get rid of nuclear power too. I just don't like to overstate the case.

Kim O'Hara wrote: as she clearly has such a hardline stance that she won't admit that there are safe levels of radiation.

No amount of radiation is harmless. It is just a matter of degree how bad it is. Of course there are levels that will not be a cause for cancer within next 10 years (but who knows about longer period of time). But is it really safe?

”Even the water melting from the snow-capped peaks can find its way to the ocean"

Thanks for the warning, Padma Norbu. I looked for confirmation before panicking (just because I think that's usually sensible) and found versions of that report all over the alternative media but nowhere on the mainstream news services, e.g. CNN, ABC (Aust), Al Jazeera. TEPCO has a history of incompetence and of lying to cover it up but the mainstream news should be onto the story by now if there's real meat in it. Wait and see?

No - I'm not quite that naive, or that trusting. But when none of the three major and quite independent news agencies, from three different continents, that I looked at even mentioned the story, then I feel justified in discounting the panic mode of the unsubstantiated reports that I have seen. As I said, wait and see. If the story is there, it will make its way into mainstream media. Or do you have a better strategy for discovering the truth? I'm (genuinely) willing to learn.

Okay ... working its way towards the mainstream, perhaps. But I can't find the TEPCO "report" - the link takes you to the front page of TEPCO's site, not to a specific report or announcement. And Advanced search told me ...

The idea that you should wait for the mainstream media (i.e. ministry of propaganda) to report a story before one accepts it as truth is really not reliable.

The mainstream media reports that which serves its interest in both the US and UK, and if all media was nationalised, their jobs and reporting approaches would hardly change. Journalist have control of the nation, and modern media practices are informed by the techniques of the school of "public opinion" as defined by Walter Lippmann: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Lippmann. If you nationalised mainstream media, you would still have conservative news reporting the official "opposition" to give the illusion that there is some kind of alternative, or some kind of debate. But newsflash: there is no debate. The observations of Ben Bagdikian's "The Media Monopoly" from 1983 still ring true today, as works like "End Times: The Death of the Fourth Estate" by Alexander Cockburn argue quite coherently. There used to be challenge in the media, and all major stories would have genuine investigation into opposing view points in most mainstream media, at a declining rate, until more or less after Watergate.

In a democracy, the mainstream media rules. Lippmann points out that public opinion always shifts towards the opinions of the journalists who explain subjects to the public, and in democracies, vox populi, vox dei. Conservative means right of the mainstream, and progressive means left of the mainstream, but the mainstream is always the same, and is always how the nation is governed. When the mainstream shifts, the definition of progressive and conservative also shift - just consider how "progressive" in 1914 is very conservative by 2014 standards. Thus it is nonsense to claim that mainstream media can be progressive or conservative in bias, since by definition bias must be one side or the other of the mainstream. Progressivism however, is always considered idealism, which is rooted in protestant Christian ideals (Quaker and dissenters to be exact), so the mainstream tends to shift left, rather than right. But whatever views the public at large hold, it is inculcated in them from birth to death by the information system of progressive democratic society: via. media, public schools, and universities. Public opinion, i.e. Rousseau's General Will, People's Will, Popular Sovereignty etc. is the ideology of democracy, just as monarchism is the ideology of monarchy. It must be this way, because in democracy, if everyone has different versions of the way they view the world, anarchy will ensue, thus naturally, democracies will coalesce around the system of public opinion -- just observe how countries with mainstream media that is untrusted, are tending towards greater chaos through social media. The internet will gradually destabilise the control system of public opinion, because people are gradually learning how to think for themselves by looking at the data and analysing it themselves, thus making democracies more and more unstable. They are realising that truth is not what mainstream media dictates, or necessarily anything close to the public will, but what is supported by evidence, is less convoluted and less contradicted, and what makes the most logical sense.

The mainstream media has no moral scruples, only individuals guiding their analyses by logic and reason can determine what is right and what is wrong. The mainstream media naturally, being made up of networks of corrupt politicians greedy for power and funds, is guided not by reason and careful analysis of the arguments, but simply what they can get away with while making the most bang for their buck. You see, you don't get funding for reporting stories which don't exist, or for rebutting controversies which haven't arisen - you get funding for creating stories, and contriving controversies.

Fukushima isn't a great boon, what money can people make off that story? There isn't a mass industry to be contrived by selling people anti-radiation equipment, because the radiation is too hard to avoid.

Climate change on the other hand is very easy to make a buck off of. Just consider this latest revelation in the BBC's disastrous decision to pump up the propaganda, all to cost the tax payers ridiculous amounts on useless sources of energy which will have no effect on climate change at all. The story was in the Telegraph in November, but you'll never hear about it because it's not mainstream - it's not public opinion, the controllers don't want you to be brainwashed out of paying them billions of dollars for nothing, it's just a cash grab:

Christopher Booker, 'The BBC's ''dirty little secret' lands it in a new scandal'' The Telegraph, 7:00PM GMT 17 Nov 2012 wrote:Unfolding in the shadow of the greatest crisis in the BBC’s 90-year history has been another scandal, rather less publicised, which again reveals how profoundly the BBC has gone off the rails, morally and professionally. Last week, I reported how the BBC had spent large sums of our money fielding an array of lawyers against a pensioner from Wales to hide what I called, with considerable understatement, “a dirty little secret”. But that secret has now been disclosed to the world, confirming how seriously the BBC has been misrepresenting its policy on one of the most far-reaching issues of our time.

A year ago, I published a detailed report attempting to unravel what has long been a serious puzzle. How was it that, over the past six years, the BBC has been so ready to betray its statutory duty to impartiality by such relentlessly one-sided promotion of the scare over global warming and all it entails, such as the Government’s policy on wind farms? No organisation has done more to obscure the truth about an issue whose political and financial implications for us all are incalculable.

The BBC’s decision to defy its charter obligation to report on this subject impartially followed from a secret day-long seminar held at Television Centre on January 26, 2006. It was attended by all the BBC’s top brass, including George Entwistle, the short-lived director-general, then head of TV current affairs, and several executives who have had to “step aside” because of the Savile affair, such as Helen Boaden, then director of news, and Steve Mitchell, then head of radio news.

In 2007, the BBC Trust published a report claiming that this unprecedented decision to flout its charter was taken after a “high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts” on climate change. Among those who tried to get the BBC to identify these “experts” was Tony Newbery, the blogger who recently faced the might of a highly paid legal team which persuaded an information tribunal to uphold the BBC’s right to keep secret the names of those attending this seminar.

When, last week, those names were finally revealed – thanks to another blogger, Maurizio Morabito (see omnilogos.com) and the Wayback Machine, which stores information deleted from the internet – the result was even more startling than had been suspected. Only three of the “28 specialists” invited to advise the BBC were active scientists, none of them climate experts and all committed global-warming alarmists. Virtually all the rest were professional climate-change lobbyists, ranging from emissaries of Greenpeace and the Stop Climate Chaos campaign to the “CO2 project manager” for BP, one of the world’s largest oil companies.

As shown in my report, “The BBC and Climate Change: A Triple Betrayal” (on the Global Warming Policy Foundation website), the consequences of what this roomful of “climate activists” advocated as BBC policy were devastating. The seminar’s co-organisers, Roger Harrabin and Joe Smith, were later able to boast that one of the first fruits of their good work was the BBC’s Climate Chaos season, a stream of unashamedly propagandist documentaries, led off with two fronted by Sir David Attenborough which featured a string of ludicrous scare stories.

This was merely the prelude to hundreds of further examples, up to the present day, of how the BBC has abandoned any pretence at honest or properly researched reporting – all in accord with the party line agreed on at that seminar, the nature of which the BBC was so desperate to keep secret.

As with the Savile scandal, there seems no end to the further embarrassments the BBC cover-up has been bringing to light. Harrabin and Smith ran a small outfit set up to lobby the media on global warming, funded by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, WWF and the University of East Anglia (home of the Climategate emails scandal).

Stranger still, their co-sponsor of the BBC seminar was another lobbying group calling itself the International Broadcasting Trust, which in the past seven years has received £520,000 from the Department for International Development’s foreign-aid budget for “media research” – which includes lobbying the BBC on issues such as climate change. This body in turn is part of a “coalition” known as the Broadcasting Trust, and one of its partners in that is the Media Trust – of which the BBC is a “corporate member”.

So our climate-change obsessed governments have given public money to bodies to lobby the BBC, including one closely associated with a body that the BBC itself belongs to – all to ensure that the BBC promotes government policy.

There is a scandal here that is, in its own way, as disturbing as the one over the Savile affair. But whereas that is being looked into by a series of inquiries, we can be sure that no one will inquire into this second scandal. Remember, after all, how the BBC Trust (now chaired by that committed warmist Lord Patten) aided the cover-up with that lie about “the best scientific experts” in its 2007 report – which was, laughably, supposed to be addressing the BBC’s statutory commitment to impartiality.

Isn’t it odd how often, through all this, one word recurs: “trust”?

What should you do then?

Simple, just think for yourself. Look at the evidence, evaluate its accuracy, analyse it, and develop the most likely theory. It's called the scientific method. The same approach should be taken in Buddhism, authority, be it of the Buddha or of the Mainstream media (but especially of the mainstream media), should not be accepted without your own investigation. Aryadeva quotes the Buddha as follows:

Jñanasara-Samuccaya wrote:As the wise test the purity of gold by burning, cutting and examining it by means of a piece of touchstone, so should you accept my words after examining them and not merely out of regard and reverence for me.